Twelfth Night

Twelfth Night Critically acclaimed as one of Shakespeare s most complex and intriguing plays Twelfth Night is a classic romantic comedy of mistaken identities In recent years it has returned to the center of criti

Title: Twelfth Night

Author: William Shakespeare Keir Elam

ISBN: 9781903436998

Page: 250

Format: Paperback

Critically acclaimed as one of Shakespeare s most complex and intriguing plays, Twelfth Night is a classic romantic comedy of mistaken identities In recent years it has returned to the center of critical debate surrounding gender and sexuality The introduction explores the multiple factors that make up the play s rich textual, theatrical, critical, and cultural history.Critically acclaimed as one of Shakespeare s most complex and intriguing plays, Twelfth Night is a classic romantic comedy of mistaken identities In recent years it has returned to the center of critical debate surrounding gender and sexuality The introduction explores the multiple factors that make up the play s rich textual, theatrical, critical, and cultural history Keir Elam surveys the play s production and reception, emphasizing the role of the spectator both within the comedy and the playhouse He also discusses the themes of perspective and interpreting visual images, theatric and film adaptations of the play, and Twelfth Night s comedic elements, and provides individual analyses of Malvolio, Sir Toby, Sir Andrew, Feste, Orsino, Olivia, and Viola Editorial craft, casting and the use of music are addressed in the appendices, which also include a list of abbreviations and references, a catalog of Shakespeare s works and works partly by Shakespeare, and citations for the modern productions mentioned in the text, other collated editions of Twelfth Night, and other related reading.The Arden Shakespeare has developed a reputation as the pre eminent critical edition of Shakespeare for its exceptional scholarship, reflected in the thoroughness of each volume An introduction comprehensively contextualizes the play, chronicling the history and culture that surrounded and influenced Shakespeare at the time of its writing and performance, and closely surveying critical approaches to the work Detailed appendices address problems like dating and casting, and analyze the differing Quarto and Folio sources A full commentary by one or of the play s foremost contemporary scholars illuminates the text, glossing unfamiliar terms and drawing from an abundance of research and expertise to explain allusions and significant background information Highly informative and accessible, Arden offers the fullest experience of Shakespeare available to a reader.

Twelfth Night Archive news th Aug Reading Rock DVD Special Offer To commemorate the th anniversary of playing at the Reading Rock Festival, the DVD of our legendary performance is now available for a limited period at the special price of just the normal price is . Twelfth NightTwelfth Night, or What You Will is a comedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written around as a Twelfth Night s entertainment for the close of the Christmas season The play centres on the twins Viola and Sebastian, who are separated in a shipwreck.Viola who is disguised as Cesario falls in love with Duke Orsino, who in turn is in love with the Countess Olivia. Twelfth Night Public Theater From the early th century to , sign language was the shared language of part of Martha s Vineyard This was an inclusive community with a communal language used by all, hearing and Deaf alike Our imagining of Illyria the magical city of Twelfth Night draws inspiration from here. SparkNotes Twelfth Night Characters See a complete list of the characters in Twelfth Night and in depth analyses of Viola, Orsino and Olivia, and Malvolio. Twelfth Night, Or, What You Will Dover Thrift A delightfully comic tale of mistaken identities, Twelfth Night revolves around the physical likeness between Sebastian and his twin sister, Viola, each of whom, when separated after a shipwreck, believes the other to be dead The theatrical romp begins when Viola assumes the identity of Cesario, a page in the household of the Duke of Orsino. Twelfth Night Productions ONCE ON THIS ISLAND Book and Lyrics by Lynn Aherns, Music by Stephen Flaherty Based on the Novel My Love bu Rosa Guy Presented by special arrangement with Music Theatre International Twelfth Night film Twelfth Night also known as Twelfth Night Or What You Will is a British film adaptation of William Shakespeare s play, directed by Trevor Nunn and featuring an all star cast Set in the late th century, it was filmed on location in Cornwall, including scenes shot at Padstow and at Lanhydrock House near Bodmin, with Orsino and his followers wearing uniforms that evoke the Austro Twelfth Night the play by William Shakespeare Famous Quotes Quotations The quotes from Twelfth Night are amongst Shakespeare s most famous including some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them. The Twelfth Night Theatre The Boutique Twelfth Night Theatre is popularly known as the theatre where every seat is a good seat where every show is the best Since , Twelfth Night Theatre is owned by Gail Wiltshire. Full text script of the play Twelfth Night by William Twelfth Night Picture The Globe Theatre which was the venue of many first performances of William Shakespeare s plays

About "William Shakespeare Keir Elam"

William Shakespeare Keir Elam

William Shakespeare baptised 26 April 1564 was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world s pre eminent dramatist He is often called England s national poet and the Bard of Avon or simply The Bard His surviving works consist of 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and several other poems His plays have been translated into every major living language, and are performed often than those of any other playwright.Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford upon Avon Scholars believe that he died on his fifty second birthday, coinciding with St George s Day.At the age of 18 he married Anne Hathaway, who bore him three children Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith Between 1585 and 1592 he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part owner of the playing company the Lord Chamberlain s Men, later known as the King s Men He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613, where he died three years later Few records of Shakespeare s private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others.Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1590 and 1613 His early plays were mainly comedies and histories, genres he raised to the peak of sophistication and artistry by the end of the sixteenth century Next he wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest examples in the English language In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime, and in 1623, two of his former theatrical colleagues published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare s.Shakespeare was a respected poet and playwright in his own day, but his reputation did not rise to its present heights until the nineteenth century The Romantics, in particular, acclaimed Shakespeare s genius, and the Victorians hero worshipped Shakespeare with a reverence that George Bernard Shaw called bardolatry In the twentieth century, his work was repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance His plays remain highly popular today and are consistently performed and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world.According to historians, Shakespeare wrote 37 plays and 154 sonnets throughout the span of his life Shakespeare s writing average was 1.5 plays a year since he first started writing in 1589 There have been plays and sonnets attributed to Shakespeare that were not authentically written by the great master of language and literature.

604 Comments

I wish I could've seen what performances of this play were like in Shakespeare's time. Since women couldn't be on stage, men had to play the women's roles, which means that the guy playing Viola had to also dress up as a man while acting like a woman. You have to wonder if the audience ever really knew what was going on. I'll bet you anything you like that some form of the following conversation took place in the Globe Theater at one point:GROUNDLING 1: Wait, wasn't that guy playing a girl? Why' [...]

Twins: Freaky or Fun?Twelfth Night is Shakespeare's answer to that age-old question.While I was listening to this, I had no idea that Viola & Sebastian were twins. As far as I knew, they were just siblings. But, apparently, they were (<--if I had read the blurb, I would have known this).And, apparently, it was also easy to pass as a man 400 years ago! I guess if Gwen could do it (and still find time to write her ever-practical GOOP blog), then I could too!This is useful to know, in case I [...]

“Twelfth night” is probably the most well rounded of all the Shakespearean comedies I have read so far, both for its structure and thematic scope, which is close to the darkest side of his best tragedies. Evading the somewhat shallow hedonism of his earlier comedies, the perplexed reader encounters a play that is opened with a shipwreck on the coast of the fictional town of Illyria. The twins Viola and Sebastian were onboard of the crashed vessel but they lose sight of each other amidst the [...]

Book Review4 out of 5 stars to Twelfth Night, a comedy written in 1601 by William Shakespeare. There are more reviews written about Shakespeare than either of us know what to do with, on, over or about. So you're not getting a review from me. What I will say is the following: Love him or not, the man can create brilliant plots and characters. Twins. Mistaken identities. Tomfoolery. Witchcraft. A chain of "who's on first" when it comes to which character is in love with which other character. Con [...]

The treatment of Malvolio is a little too cruel, Belch and Aguecheek are a little too coarse, and the resolution is a little too abrupt, and so this excellent Shakespearean comedy falls a little short of perfection. Still, the poetry about music and the songs themselves are wonderful, Viola and Orsino are charming, and Feste is the wisest and best of clowns.

Now a strange, astonishing thing or two , happened, off the west coast of the Balkans, ( Illyria), in an undetermined age, aristocratic, identical twins, a boy and a girl, well around twenty, give or take a few years, were lost at sea, shipwrecked by a powerful storm. Presumed drowned by the other surviving sibling, both saw their relative in an untenable situation. But this being a play, the twins keep on breathing, reaching the beautiful, dry, glorious beach, with separate help from out of the [...]

Reading Shakespeare is almost like going down into the basement of literature and examining the foundations. So often I find the origins of what has become trite and overdone, and yet Shakespeare was the fountain from which so much springs. This is especially true of Twelfth Night, it is apparent that so many comedies and romances over the centuries were heavily influenced by this play.Very entertaining.

Twelfth Night; or, What You Will, William ShakespeareTwelfth Night, or What You Will is a comedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written around 1601–02 as a Twelfth Night's entertainment for the close of the Christmas season. The play centres on the twins Viola and Sebastian, who are separated in a shipwreck. Viola (who is disguised as Cesario) falls in love with Duke Orsino, who in turn is in love with the Countess Olivia. Upon meeting Viola, Countess Olivia falls in love with h [...]

December 31, 2017 reviewMy return to the world of William Shakespeare and my favorite play--though I find Hamlet and Much Ado About Nothing to be superior dramatically, neither are as romantic or riotously funny as this--brought me back to my first reread on and Twelfth Night. Work on my novel ground to a halt several weeks ago at the halfway mark and I wanted to return to a couple of texts that remind me of why I'm a writer. I also noticed that as of December 30, I was one book short of my 201 [...]

I really didn’t expect to like this. Most comedy is wasted on me, but Shakespearean comedy is just so damn funny. Reading this play is only half the picture. I think this is a play that really must be seen in performance as well. I watched a DvD version of the recent globe production and I was practically rolling on my living room floor with laughter. It had an all-male cast, which just made it even better. Mark Rylance as Olivia was just pure comic genius, and Stephen Fry as Malvolio was just [...]

Twelfth night being the last comedy of William Shakespeare, is highly acclaimed and panned at equal measures. We come to peruse and praise his literary genius through his artistic handling of different themes packed in one play. On the surface, the play exhibits traces of mistaken identity, deception, Lovesickness, melancholy, desire and abundance, gender and sex, master and servant, but on the broader canvass, the colors are more vivid and glaring laden with undercurrent meanings of these theme [...]

So this one doesn't rank terribly high on the believability scale, but this is still my favorite Shakespeare comedy. It's absurd to have a set of fraternal twins -- brother and sister! -- who look so much alike that people who know them reasonably well can't tell them apart. Shakespeare may not have been entirely clear on the distinction between identical and fraternal twins or, more likely, he just didn't care. But push the Disbelief Suspension button here and just go have fun with this love tr [...]

A few years ago I read a review of some film that had come out and I was sure I would never see – read the review almost carelessly while flicking through the arts section of the paper on a Saturday morning, no, I must have been clicking over The Age Home Page. The woman who wrote the review commented that whatever the film was had been based on Twelfth Night – which she considered that most ridiculous of Shakespeare’s plays – she really could not see how anyone could be bothered to repr [...]

I liked the dialogue in this one a lot more than the first one we read for class (A Comedy of Errors). I love the whole "girl poses as a guy in order to trick misogynists into letting her participate in their society" trope, and I just in general loved Olivia and Viola as characters, so I was super into this. My only complaint is that the ending wraps up too swiftly for me and a few of the plotlines were just kinda smooshed into one grand finale, but I was left wanting more. Not the best Shakesp [...]

"If you be not mad, be gone; if you have reason, be brief."- William Shakespeare, Twelfth NightI liked it, but didn't love it. Positives: I always like Shakespeare's gender benders. The Bard enjoys not playing characters straight. He doesn't want a love story or even a love triangle, Shakespeare wants to explore all the tangents, the lines, and the angles of love's many geometries. He is a great experimenter of the human soul. He is the Faraday of romance, unsatisfied until he has teased out all [...]

4 StarsOverview"Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them."While not his most well-known work, The Twelfth Night is certainly one of my favorite works by Shakespeare. I've always enjoyed his comedies more than his tragedies, and this one was filled with his trademark wit and crazy situationsPros:Shakespeare loved him some wordplay, and as always, it's masterful. The jokes were quick and hilarious, while still revealing thi [...]

You know what? I think this play is the Shakespearean equivalent of Three’s Company, a laugh-track comedy with goofball characters and preposterous situations that trigger a chain of events you can see coming a mile away. We’re talking here about a play in which a woman masquerades as a man (pretty much for the hell of it), deceiving everyone into believing she’s a dude without testes—because how else do you, in the absence of injectable testosterone products, convince people you’re a [...]

One of my book resolutions this year is to read more classics, including some of Shakespeare's plays. Shockingly, I've only read a couple, but ironically I read Twelfth Night at the tender age of 14 as part of my year 9 English class. I wanted to see how much I remembered etc. Surprising, not much. Basically Viola and her brother Sebastian are involved in a shipwreck, washing up on the shores of Illyria. Both think the other is dead, and Viola dresses up as a bloke to protect her honour or whate [...]

3.5/5I'm glad I read this in class because I wouldn't have gotten much out of it otherwise. Shakespeare may be Shakespeare, but I am also I, and I know my tastes well enough to have before reading this thought "Bro I love certain pieces of your work but I'm fairly certain this is not going to have a honeymoon ending." Comedies tend to make me nervous with their glee and their joy and their soap bubble ideologies, and while the playwright did some wonderfully complex things with gender and the tr [...]

Comedies are never my favorites of Shakespeare, though this was quite a delightful reading for Yule. A bit silly and nonsensical does make it fanciful and worked well for me. Honestly, Shakespeare is one of those things that I think is infinitely better in performance than reading, especially the comedies.It was between Twelfth Night and A Winter's Tale--I chose this one. I suppose I'll save A Winter's Tale for next Yule and finally read the bloodbath that is Titus Andronicus. Onwards!

I've just written another review for a more modern play, complaining about how they're not made for reading, but watching. Although I'd say Shakespeare kind of breaks that rule. I often enjoy the words on the page as much, if not more than watching a stage performance. However, I feel like Twelfth Night needs to be seen. There's quite a lot of stage direction and subtleties that are missed just by reading, or at least they are if you're not familiar with the story. I chose to watch a production [...]

Thoughts two seconds after having finished Twelfth Night:Everybody was gay and the next second, next thing you know it was ‘guess we’re not?’ Honestly it was the weirdest thing I read by Shakespeare. It’s not that nothing made sense but it was a lot of secondary stories colliding with each others to make this main one and it was difficult to follow at times.But yeah, it went from ‘welcome to the land of gays’ to ‘no homo’ in a nano second. For nearly the entire story I thought we [...]

Besides "Much ado about nothing", Twelfth Night is my favourite Shakespeare play.The major character is Viola, who after losing her twin brother, is forced to disguise herself as a boy to survive in a strange and hostile land (namely Illyria which is at war with her home county, Messaline). She musters all her courage to hide her pain over the supposed death of her brother. But struggles are not over as she also has to hide her passionate love from Orsino, the Duke of Illyira whom she serves.Her [...]

I prefer Shakespeare comedies to his tragedies and Twelfth Night was the most loved of that genre as far as I remember. Having previously read when I was too young to appreciate Shakespearean work, I wanted to revisit this particular comedy that I remembered loving. The story contains separation of twins due to a shipwreck, mistaken identity, a cruel trick of heart played on a steward and a tangle love, all of which are nicely settled in the end. The characters are interesting and the play is fi [...]

We went to see a Cambridge University production of this last night, set in a similar period to the production we saw of As You Like It we saw earlier this year.Zak Ghazi-Torbatt was hilarious as the perpetually drunk aristocrat Sir Toby Belch (subtlety is not the long suit of this play), he worked well with his off-sider, Sir Aguecheek, ably played by Ryan Monk. Ben Walsh’s Malvolio was a object lesson in how to not overplay comic creepiness. Megan Gilbert looked like an old hand doing Maria: [...]